Don’t be fooled by anyone who says a fresh set of sexts upends the race — they’ve generated a lot of attention and given his opponents another chance to score points by shaming him. But the most they’ll do is speed a collapse that most New York campaign veterans were confident was coming anyway.

The polls that showed Carlos Danger’s alter ego at the top of the field, independent pollsters and experienced local operatives agree, were never much more than an electoral sugar high in a race that most New York voters are still weeks away from paying attention to.

Running a campaign mostly on his own adrenaline works for now — but come Primary Day, Weiner will have none of the field operation, either from unions and institutional support or a paid effort, that will make the difference in what’s expected to be a low turnout election. New York City primaries tend to turn in the final week between Labor Day and when polls open the following Tuesday. Even without seeing new naked pictures of him, veterans of New York elections assumed he’d never make it to that point as a leading candidate.

“He was high in a crowded field where an electorate was still not really focusing on the race. He had support that got him past the initial threshold of getting back in the race,” said Marist Poll director Lee Miringoff. “On the one hand, he had numbers which made his candidacy something that caught notice from his opponents. On the other hand, he was far from on his way to taking the oath of office. We were talking at best the second inning.”

Weiner was always going to struggle to get one of the two spots in the all-but-certain Oct. 1 runoff that will be triggered if no candidate gets 40 percent in the Sept. 10 primary. If he does, just about every political interest in New York that’s been split between his opponents is going to coalesce behind the other candidate. And if somehow he does land the nomination, he’d probably be easy pickings for one of the well-funded Republicans looking to pick up their party’s sixth straight mayoral win.

There won’t be reliable post-revelation press conference polls for a few days. But whatever they show, the assumption is that long term, the latest trip through Weiner’s libido means he’s probably lost the spot in the runoff that most assumed name recognition would be enough to carry him to. Instead of a race to see who beats Weiner, the Democratic primary is looking more and more like a race to see who’ll fight it out for the nomination.

But getting to Gracie Mansion wasn’t the point of this campaign. Most people involved with New York politics saw the decision to get into the race as more about washing him clean of all his past sins, sexts and embarrassment for the next time he does. Maybe, just maybe, he’d get elected — but he didn’t need to become mayor to count 2013 as a win.

Of course, a new round of graphic — complete with graphics — online conversations complicates even that. But if Weiner’s mayoral run was ultimately a Trojan Horse for political redemption, there’s a simple answer to whether he ends it in the wake of that redemption getting challenged: He can’t, and he won’t.

“If his original logic was, ‘I’m going to use this race which I probably won’t win just as a point of redemption to run again in the future,’ that logic still holds,” said one unaffiliated New York Democratic strategist. “But that means he does need to stop tweeting pictures of his penis. Forever. And so far he hasn’t been able to do that.”

Wednesday night, after a day and a half of opponents saying he’d turned their race into a circus and calling on him to quit, Weiner drew loud support at a debate as he insisted that he was trying to focus on issues and substance. He also tried a little humor, responding to a a candidate who said he was still learning how to use Twitter, “don’t ask me.”